Archives | Yaël Abecassis

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who died on November 4, 1995, was murdered by a 25-year-old, right wing law student who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords and the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. The assassination of Rabin was a shock to the Israeli public and it has forever changed the politics of the region.

Rabin, The Last Day combines staged re-enactments with actual news footage of the shooting, talking-head interviews (one with former Israeli president Shimon Peres) and rare video of the removal of Jewish settlers from occupied Gaza. But even the fictional deposition scenes were made with direct transcripts from the Shamgar Commission, which investigated the Prime Minister’s assassination.

Gifted Eyad (Tawfeek Barhom), a Palestinian Israeli boy, is given the chance to go to a prestigious Jewish boarding school in Jerusalem. As he desperately tries to fit in with his Jewish schoolmates and within Israeli society, Eyad develops a friendship with another outsider, Jonathan (Michael Moshonov, Lebanon) a boy suffering from muscular dystrophy, and gradually becomes part of the home Jonathan shares with his mother, Edna (Yael Abecassis, Kadosh, Alila, To Live and Become). After falling in love with Naomi (Daniel Kitsis), a Jewish girl, he leaves school when their relationship is uncovered, and he discovers that he will have to sacrifice his identity in order to be accepted. Faced with a choice, Eyad will have to make a decision that will change his life forever.

Three elderly and a child, finding themselves stuck together in a nursing home in Jerusalem. On the one hand, the kid (Gil Blank) which is genius, but socially retarded, and on the other hand, his grandfather (Sasson Gabai), whom he had never met, an x member in the Lehi organization and a cold person. With them – the granfather’s best friend from Lehi (Moni Moshonov), full of ambition and passion which will never materialize, and the boy’s English uncle (Patrick Stewart), a depressed and poor actor who owed 232,000 euro. But there’s one thing keeping them together – they all want to rob a bank. They want to avenge it for not paying the boy compensation for his dad’s death, only due to the tiny letters. And they want the money to make their last wished come true.

Moshe and Tami are a couple, Moshe is in his fifties and Tami is in her early twenties.
They live together in a cruel and violent relationship, from which Tami seems unable to set herself free. [Synopsis courtesy of Cannes Film Festival]